The man in the car next to me is on the phone with the police. Just beyond him on the grass, a teenager in a hoodie is moving erratically. He takes off and the man chases after him, despite the police urging him to sit tight.

It is, of course, the story of Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman. In the three years since Martin's death, the #blacklivesmatter movement that sprung up in its wake has gone international and come to encompass many more unjust killings. It's a story with which Americans have become sadly familiar.

But it was still jarring to be there at the moment of Martin's death. Inside a Samsung Gear virtual reality headset at the River VR startup accelerator SXSW expo, I watched grainy security camera footage of Martin buying Skittles and juice at a 7-Eleven. Then my perspective jumped to an animated recreation of Martin and Zimmerman's first encounter. After the two figures ran out of view, I was transported into the apartments of witnesses as real 911 audio played. I jumped at the sound of the gunshot.

Immersive Journalism

The story is the work of Emblematic Group, a Los Angeles-based startup founded by veteran journalist Nonny de la Peña and game designer Michael Licht. de la Peña said they threw the Martin film together in just a few weeks to show what kind of national story Emblematic can do on a headset like Gear, which requires you to be stationary within VR.

"I felt that the story was representative of a larger issue that's being reflected on in America right now," de la Peña said. "I've been thinking about building it since it happened. I have a strong enough team now that we can just make stuff."

She waved me into a back room, where the floor had been cleared for the startup's demonstration. I donned Emblematic's custom-made VR headset. Movement-tracking sensors jutted out of its top like a telephone pole.

Emblematic's custom-made virtual reality headset.

Emblematic, which has been around since 2007, built its custom headset back when there weren't any options for interactive virtual reality. Being able to walk around a room just wasn't possible with publicly available headsets.

That's changing. Both the HTC Vive, which was made in partnership with gaming company Valve, and Sony's Project Morpheus headset allow the wearer to take steps and interact with the virtual world. de la Peña said Emblematic isn't ruling out any platform. She agreed that Vive, which is the first option that opens up a whole room for movement, is particularly exciting.

A Rocket Strike In Syria

Inside the headset, I paced around an animated recreation of a city street in Syria. A young girl sang until a rocket hit, leveling the people and objects around me. The view then cut to a refugee camp.

de la Peña said the medium has brought her some controversy. At a recent filmmaker breakfast, her table was split on if virtual reality was a good fit or an impossible one for journalism. But de la Peña said that as soon as people try it, they're converted.

My personal unease with the medium came from some of the storytelling techniques. I felt real horror at the sound of the bomb and gunshot. I felt sad as ghostly people began to fill the refugee camp around me, and my heart hurt for Martin when Zimmerman took off after him. But I didn't come away with a deeper understanding of why.

Part of the reason Emblematic chose Martin's story is because it has strong audio. There were many, many calls to the police that day, including Zimmerman's chilling dialogue. Emblematic simply presented exactly what happened from the viewpoint of the witnesses narrating the shooting to 911. That's journalism.

Becoming A Witness To Events

de la Peña said editorializing may be essential for some types of stories. Virtual reality has the potential to drop the viewer into any scene, or even put them in someone's shoes. When the storyteller is free to help us see the world through Martin, or even Zimmerman's, eyes, that's when virtual reality gets taken to an entirely new level.

Emblematic has been working with a very small budget up until this point. With funding, it will be able to construct animated recreations that are more lifelike. It will diversify the types of stories it documents and look into shooting live action video. It will be able to build longer pieces that capitalize on the medium's true potential: empathy. I want to understand Martin and Zimmerman, and Emblematic is close to delivering on that.

"I couldn't do anything else with my life once I got involved with this field. It's just so visceral and emotional and intense," de la Peña said. "When you make stories, whether it's journalistic or fiction, you're really trying to take something that's inside you and give people the experience you're having in your mind. VR gets me closer to that than anything else."

Screenshots courtesy of Emblematic; photo by Signe Brewster for ReadWrite

Wearable World is a good home for ReadWrite, and I'm energized by the conversations I have with our CEO, Redg Snodgrass, about our shared mission to democratize technology.

Gigaom's closure is a stark reminder, though, that the conventional advertising model, even when complemented by businesses like events and research, isn't always enough to allow independent reporting about technology to thrive. ReadWrite will turn 12 on April 20, 2015. I'd like to see it keep growing through its teenage years—and realize its fullest potential.

There's been a lotofbuzz about saving Gigaom through a crowdfunding campaign. Om Malik is a beloved former colleague from our days at Business 2.0, and I'm friends with many current and former members of the Gigaom team. I'd love to see the site survive.

But I worry that it's too late: Gigaom's course was set when the company raised venture capital. With the assets in the hand of a bank and investors with a legal claim on any new funds coming in, I'm not sure how a crowdfunded rescue would work.

The ReadWrite Crowd

A crowdfunding campaign for ReadWrite, though, is intriguing. If our mission is to democratize technology and allow everyone who might be interested in building a better world with hardware and software to participate, why not let them participate directly in building ReadWrite, too?

What would we do with the money? I don't think we'd put the site behind a paywall—that would mean turning away people who wanted to learn and grow. I don't think we'd turn off ads on ReadWrite, but it would let us be far more choosy about the ones we run. If we were a member-driven publication, we'd only let in advertisers who delivered messages of real value.

We'd of course greatly expand our newsroom and deepen our coverage of every aspect of technology. (I'd love to bring on every member of the former Gigaom team—in fact, I've already signed one up as a freelancer to help with our coverage of South By Southwest Interactive.)

A Community Of Purpose

Those are details, though. What matters to me most is the notion of reestablishing a direct connection with our readers by treating you as people who belong to a community that's meaningful and specific. I hear from you through email, on Twitter, and in the comments—but there could be so much more to our relationship.

That includes a give and take. If ReadWrite pursued a crowdfunding campaign, what would you be interested in paying for, beyond just supporting the work we're already doing today? What accountability would you ask for in terms of the results and value we delivered?

ReadWrite's not a gadget. It's something very different. But whether we do a crowdfunding campaign or fund ReadWrite in other novel ways, what it will become over the next dozen years must be driven by the people who read it. There's no other way for us to grow and prosper.

If you have thoughts on how ReadWrite might run a crowdfunding campaign, send me a message on Twitter (@owenthomas) or leave a comment below.

The guidelines, called “pressiquette,” short for "press etiquette," request that reporters ask the original poster—the "redditor," or Reddit user," in the site's distinctive language—for permission to use anything posted on Reddit.

Journalists are also advised to search the Internet to make sure it’s an original photo. “Reposts,” or posts of someone else’s work that’s been uploaded by another individual are quite common on Reddit, and it can be difficult to determine who owns the actual photo. One more complication: Reddit doesn’t host photos, just links to them, so the company suggests asking people directly through the image-hosting sites they use, such as Imgur.

If you see an interesting story or photo on Reddit, message the redditor who shared the piece to ask for their permission prior to using it in an article or list, ask how they would like it to be attributed, and provide them a deadline before you move on to another story. Please respect redditors who may wish to stay anonymous, or to not be featured in an article.

Notably, these rules arrived shortly after BuzzFeed—which built its media empire on cute animal content cut and pasted from online communities such as Reddit—received a $50 million investment on its future.

ReadWriteReflect offers a look back at major technology trends, products and companies of the past year.

Every once in a while, a tech article grabs you and doesn't let go—whether it’s because it offers much-needed help and guidance, gives you more insight into an area of interest, or transforms a topic you previously didn’t care about into a fascinating subject.

It’s the same for the editorial staffers at ReadWrite, who took a moment to reflect on a few of their favorite stories of 2013. If you haven’t checked out the following articles before, or would like to revisit some classics—all crafted with original insights and reporting—take a stroll through these selections, hand-picked by our writers and editors.

At first, this article reads like something out of dystopian science fiction. But as Brian piles on the research done to the contrary, it becomes clear that this is our greatest argument for giving the Internet of Things ironclad security. —Lauren Orsini

With iOS 7, my 4S had continual crashes, and the features that everyone raved about (i.e. parallax and motion, automatic app updates) ruined the experience. After applying the changes Adriana talked about in this article, my iPhone's performance improved. Though it's still not perfect—iOS 7 is built for iPhone 5 and above—it definitely helped. —Selena Larson

This was a terrific ReadWrite story on just about every front. It told readers something surprising about the digital services many have come to rely on, and backed up its assertions with compelling evidence. It deftly moved from discussion of streaming business models (or the lack thereof) to the history of artist-studio relations and back again. And it's very nicely written, infused with just enough personal perspective and narrative nuance to lend the piece terrific authority while keeping it light on its feet. —David Hamilton

Lauren does an excellent job breaking down Bitcoin for the casual reader who may not know what it is. I envisioned her in some dark alley buying Bitcoin in person, like she was buying Walter White's blue meth. Instead, she found a trustworthy, amiable man who helped her understand the Bitcoin market a little better. This piece puts a face on one of the most esoteric technologies of our time. —Dan Rowinski

“Anticipatory systems” is where all that data-gathering by tech companies is supposed to lead—to features that successfully anticipate what people want, and deliver it when and where they want them. It’s the driving force behind numerous current trends, from Foursquare check-ins to Siri and Google Now, as well as emerging trends, like connected homes, wearable computing and the Internet of Things. Owen insightfully keyed in on anticipatory systems and zoomed in on its primary challenge: “… how to design a great anticipatory service around a specific need — without feeling creepy or, worse, clumsy.” Nailed it. —Adriana Lee

No More Grimy Thrift Store Finds: The Polished Re-Commerce Model Is Here

An article about thrift-store shopping is way outside my field of interest, but Stephanie's wit and snap had me hooked: "Thrift shopping is a harrowing experience. Anyone who has ever stepped inside a thrift store knows it is a haven of ill-fitting clothes, mysterious stains and the overwhelming smell of mothballs and sadness." That was my favorite lede of the year. —Brian Proffitt

The tale of GoldieBlox could have been another hackneyed Kickstarter success story. But Lauren Orsini made it distinctive, by focusing on the passions of founder Debbie Sterling and the problems she solved along the way. I’m also enchanted by how readers found the story: With 125,000 pageviews generated through 79,000 shares, it made its way to its audience, not in some mass-media blast, but in the classic way we used to tell each other stories—person to person. —Owen Thomas

Tech investor Keith Rabois, whom I recently hosted at our ReadWriteMix event in August, has me rethinking those assumptions. When I pinned Rabois down on where value was going to be created in the future, he answered, "Data science."

In other words, not just the accumulation of data enabled by the ever-growing amounts of computing power, bandwidth, and storage we have available to us, but the smart application of it to reshape products, businesses, and industries in a continuous cycle of evolution and improvement.

In the tech world—the world where Bezos made his fortune—it's taken for granted that one should use data about how people use a product to make that product better and introduce new features.

What if we actually did that in the media world—without sneering, without gritting our teeth, and without oversimplifying the enormity of the task?

"Data Journalism" Needs A Redefinition

The term "data journalism" has come to have a narrow definition of "reporting using publicly available data sets." That seems woefully insufficient on two counts.

First of all, any good reporter ought to use all sources of accurate information and all available tools to vet and analyze that information. That includes databases and tools to manage and extract insights from them. We need not call this "data journalism": It's just journalism.

Second, reporting is necessary but not sufficient to commit acts of journalism. A reporter needs coconspirators: editors, photographers, and designers. Since we're online, let's add to that list product managers, engineers, and data scientists. Data ought to inform the entire operation that creates the product, not just the newsgathering.

In particular, the notion of data journalism seems to have devolved into a very narrow concept of hyperlocal reporting driven by municipal databases: a laudable effort, but such a small and often inconsequential application of a powerful idea.

A Conversation With Readers, In Bits And Bytes

What data is that? Why, it's chiefly the interactions our readers have with us—reading, commenting on, and sharing our stories. Every story we publish creates a massive trail of data exhaust. But we let much of it dissipate like the San Francisco fog on a sunny afternoon.

ReadWrite reporters Selena Larson and Adriana Lee went to work, finding ordinary users as well as developers who'd been affected and locked out of their phones. We rapidly debunked conspiracy theories that Apple was locking out nondevelopers from the beta. (Technically, only registered developers should have had access to iOS 7, but where there's a will, there's a digital way.)

Instead, we determined that the combination of an expiring older version of beta, some unexplained failure of automatic updates, and an out-of-service activation server forced users to downgrade.

Mobile editor Dan Rowinski followed up with analysis of how this beta release, the first since the ouster of Apple mobile-software executive Scott Forstall last year, seemed particularly troubled.

Listening To What Your Readers Say—And Do

Listening to your readers is as old as publishing letters to the editor. What's new is that Web analytics create an implicit conversation that is as interesting as the explicit one we've long been able to have.

Why did people read a story? How did they find it? What did they think of it?These are fundamentally human questions that have dogged storytellers since the dawn of literacy. There is nothing new about them.

We simply have better tools to get answers these days, if only we'd use them.

Analytics have a bad rap in the publishing business because of their use—misuse, rather—at entities like Demand Media and the Huffington Post. Remember the infamous headlines posing the question, "What time does the Super Bowl start?"

Data Power Should Be In Editors' Hands

I'd argue that tail-chasing search-engine optimization and short-term pageview-chasing are the result of leaving data in the wrong hands—engineers more interested in algorithms than humans, Internet opportunists chasing dollars, and overworked editors too far down the masthead tasked with delivering quantifiable results.

What we need as an industry—at the very least, what I'm trying to create at ReadWrite—is not a slavish adherence to data, but an interest in it as a proxy for the real human beings who make up our audience. Buried in the metrics is a telegraphic signal from those people—an attempt to communicate, to reach out and connect and guide us toward better stories and better ways to tell them.

We need better metrics, to be sure. A pageview is the crudest possible approximation of the interaction between a writer and a reader. How much time do they spend reading? At what pace do they scroll down the page? Do they read continuously or jumping back and forth between paragraphs? Do they follow related links and come back to the page—or wander off?

How do they find stories? Search terms are worth looking at, but they form the beginnings of questions, not answers. What do they reveal about our readers' interests and passions? How do they frame questions about a topic? What do they already know, and what background do they need to enter into an ongoing story?

Suggestions, Not Commands

When I speak in public, I watch the audience for feedback. Are they leaning forward or back? How rapt are their gazes? That guides me to do a better job.

It's no different online—or at least it shouldn't be. Analytics are tools for listening. Data about our audiences is feedback—it doesn't provide marching orders.

But should it sway us when we're thinking about areas to explore? Can it suggest what a good follow-up might be? Does it nudge us to go deeper on a topic than we'd initially planned to? I think those are all valid ways data can influence journalism.

Ultimately, you need to have an idea of what your publication stands for and who you are as a journalist. Minus those lodestones, data can provide no guidance. But if you know who you want to reach and what you hope to do for them, there's no question in my mind that data can help you fill in the map as you travel to your destination.

Everyblock, a hyperlocal news startup born in Chicago, IL, died unexpectedly this morning. The official cause of death was its lack of a sustainable business model. It is survived by its founder Adrian Holovaty, a dedicated team, a community of users and what remains of the hopes and dreams for the future of hyperlocal journalism. Everyblock was six years old.

The Next Step For Journalism

It was supposed to be the future. At a time when local newspapers were cutting staff, shrinking page counts and even shutting their doors, Everyblock was launched. Funded by a grant from the Knight Foundation, the site had a simple premise: Pull in news articles, photos and all kinds of public data sets, geotag them all, and divvy up the content by Zip code, neighborhood or even an individual street block. Let people subscribe to that information based on where they live. What could be more useful?

In 2009, the poster child for news's allegedly hyperlocal future was acquired by MSNBC, who would presumably grow the site's feature set, expand to new locales and figure out a way to make money off of it. Frustrated by its inability to do so, NBC News shut the doors on Everyblock today.

I used Everyblock for years, mostly through my RSS reader, but occasionally through its website and iPhone app. In a city like Philadelphia, where the real estate values and crime statistics can vary wildly by the block, Everyblock was priceless.

Any smart apartment hunt would necessarily include tapping open the Everyblock app to see precisely how many people get shot within a one-block radius, or three blocks, or five. Within the last 30 days or within the last year. What kind of restaurants are nearby? What are their Yelp scores? What do their inspection reports look like? Mouse turds at the pizzeria around the corner? Good to know.

Whatever you needed to know about the place in which you resided (or were thinking of residing), Everyblock could tell you. It was brilliant. And it arrived at a time when the legacy news outlets in each of these neighborhoods was growing less and less capable of delivering this kind of information.

Struggling To Live Up To Its (Huge) Potential

While I always kept the RSS feeds for my block and my neighborhood in Google Reader, I never grew quite as addicted to Everyblock as it felt like I should have been. The raw statistics were always interesting to watch, but the sources of more in-depth content seemed limited. I knew for a fact that my neighborhood was being covered by any number of local blogs and news sites, but those stories weren't popping up in my feed. Every few days I'd get an update on the latest geotagged Flickr photos from my neighborhood, but I never saw anything from Instagram, where the flood of nearby photos was much heavier.

But then, there'd be a glimmer of potential. While Everyblock didn't publish content of its own, the site did have community forums. The one for my neighborhood wasn't ever crowded with people, but valuable threads would occasionally come up. Somebody would report a suspicious person going door to door on their street. Another post would announce an e-cycling event that weekend. Others would propose ideas to improve their community. With each of these posts, you could see the potential Everyblock had for becoming a legitimate hub of community news, data and discussion. But it never took off.

Adrian Holovaty declined to answer my questions about the shutdown of Everyblock, citing a need to maintain his sanity and instead referred me to his own blog post about the matter. The news appears to have caught him off guard, just as it took Everyblock's staff and users by surprise.

Could NBC News Have Saved Everyblock?

What could NBC News have done differently? I'm sure we all have our ideas. They could have tacked on more data sets, integrated more content sources or overhauled the mobile app to make it more addictive. With multiple local editors in every city, Everyblock could have grown into a powerhouse of local journalism and information that might have filled many of the gaps left by declining legacy outlets. It's easy to suggest functionality and content improvements, but - as is always the case in this business - viable solutions for monetizing it all come less easily to one's lips or fingertips.

NBC thought they could figure it out, but evidently weren't willing to try hard enough. Hell, they weren't even willing to let Everyblock's sites stay online and allow users play with them one last time. Not even a heads up. All that searchable, location-specific public data about our cities is just gone.

Everyblock never managed to fill the all gaps that have been left in our community's information ecosystems. But it had real potential. Today, those gaps are just a little bit bigger in the locales where Everyblock was operating. We can only hope that the surviving legacy news outlets and the scrappy young media startups in these cities are collectively prepared to fill them.

We all know PR reps work charm and tsotchkes to build "relationships" with journalists and analysts, but they're way less shady than, say, Black Hat scammers in the SEO biz, right?

Apparently not. A few weeks ago, I saw the following job post on Elance. The description was a remarkably up-front pay-for-play bid:

We need people who can publish news articles at news sites PR2+.You choose the topic and weave in the subject we assign. After a review, you publish to a specified news site.Several journalists needed.

In 2013? Seriously? Wasn't Payola over in the 60s (or at least after the J-Lo scandal of 2005?). I had to see if this had legs, so I submitted a bidless proposal.

Into The Heart of Darkness

The next day, I got a response, asking me to promote a small virtualization vendor:

Their price for selling my soul? 25 bucks. That hurt.

I contacted the vendor's PR department, ready to tear them a a new one, but instead of excuses, I got shock and horror. They claimed to be completely in the dark – and I believed them. I emailed the poster, asking if the company was a knowing client. They said yes. I replied, telling them I'd contacted the company and heard just the opposite.

Crickets.

It's been four days, and all communications have ceased.

The vendor was pissed. In fact, the Senior Product Manager with whom I spoke was angry enough to threaten legal action against the job poster, and I believe that's already begun. That action is the reason I'm not naming names, though you can probably find the job by digging on your own, if you're curious. UPDATE: After the publication of the piece, I was contacted by the vendor's actual PR firm, a boutique outfit that's worked with some very large technology brands. We've worked with them in the past. At this point, I became even more convinced that the scammers were flying solo.

I reported the job to Elance, describing its varying levels of sketchiness, but it's still up, and will probably stay there. As far as I can tell (and please correct me if I'm wrong, folks), there's no law against paying for references in a blog. Still, when I mentioned "paid placement" to the poster, they shot back a clarification right away. They were "pitching an idea." They just happened to pay money if they were allowed to review the post before publication and that "idea" made its way to a site.

Pay-For-Play Alive And Well

Semantic juggling fixes everything.

The point here is that payola is apparently alive and well in the blogosphere. If the going rate is truly only $25 for a mention in a respectable publication, it's easy to see the appeal – a dozen mentions would cost less than the airfare to send one rep on a briefing. But why would one of these shady agencies spend money to promote a non-client?

The biggest advantage is protection. When you're feeling out an ethically-icky situation, you don't want to dangle any top-shelf clients that can expose you. Once the journalist is on the take, both parties have a vested interest in keeping things quiet, so the agency can relax a bit. The other benefit is promotion. The by-product of all this fishing will be a catalog of company references in relevant publications, which could be an excellent door-opener for sales. In any case, freelancing sites provide a fantastic layer of anonymity for shady promoters. It's something Elance, Guru.com and the rest of the freelance marketplaces will have to address in the future.

Maybe all my instincts are wrong, and the vendor was actually involved. It's always possible, but it doesn't change the conclusion. There's apparently still money in buying off journalists, and from the looks of it, they aren't very expensive.

SoundCloud is different now. After months of testing the next iteration of its Web app in private beta, the fast-growing audio service relaunched Tuesday morning. The result is a stickier, more social experience that bolsters SoundCloud's position as the YouTube of audio.

The most striking change is how SoundCloud looks. It sports a cleaner, more app-like interface with a vastly simplified navigation. Instead of five top-level navigation buttons, it now has just two, flanked by a much more prominent search box.

Beyond Looks: How SoundCloud Works Now

It's a huge visual refresh, but the aesthetics are practically a footnote to what's really new here. The entire service has been reengineered to fundamentally change the way people interact with it. Audio now plays back continuously as you browse the site, even as you jump from page to page. When one track ends, the next one in that user's audio stream begins. SoundCloud is also going live with a feature called "sets," which are basically user-curated playlists that exist in a single waveform.

Another key feature - new even to beta testers like myself - is the Explore tab. It's here that SoundCloud hopes to connect users with the content creators who are collectively publishing 10 hours of music, remixes, radio shows and audio commentary to SoundCloud every minute.

It's this lean-back, no-clicks-required listening experience that the company hopes will keep people engaged, spending their work days with SoundCloud instead of something like Pandora or Spotify. So far, it appears to be working. Since launching the private beta of this redesign in May, SoundCloud has seen a 30% increase in engagement.

"This will be the biggest update we've ever done in terms of core metrics," says SoundCloud cofounder and CTO Eric Wahlforss. In addition to the juicy 10 hours-per-minute audio upload stat, the company now boasts a reach of 180 million users. That's overall reach, not registered users, a metric Wahlforss says the company focusing less on these days. Wahlforss won't talk about revenue or the number of paying, premium subscribers, but he says the freemium model is working out.

The site's massive overhaul coincides with the company's other big strategic initiative: courting radio programs and other audio content providers beyond the musicians, DJs and remix artists who have populated the site from day one. This summer, SoundCloud hired public radio vet Jim Colgan to oversee content relationships, and the platform is increasingly beloved by journalists. The company stops short of using the term "radio" in its marketing efforts, but you can see how SoundCloud could slowly carve out a key role in that medium's future.

SoundCloud Grows Into a Truly Social Platform

Continuous playback is nice (and some might say, now a fairly standard feature on music sites), but it's not enough to keep people tuned in. There has to be some intelligence behind what content is playing and why. To achieve that, SoundCloud is becoming more social, leveraging Facebook user data to connect users with the most appropriate sound creators and building in some Twitter-style interactive features of its own.

Starting with the sign-up screen, the Facebook integration is tighter. When you authenticate using your Facbeook account, SoundCloud scans your likes and tries to figure out which record labels, radio programs, musicians and everyday users you might want to follow. Again, this is fairly standard stuff for a social service (and the lack of a Twitter friend-finder is surprising), but it's a significant step toward SoundCloud becoming not just an audio-hosting service, but a sound discovery engine as well.

"The better we know you, the better the stuff we can play for you," says Wahlforss. "I think the future is very much going in that direction: A highly personalized continuous playback experience powered by smart algorithms on the one hand and great curators on the other."

It makes sense. The more people you follow, the more relevant audio will playback and the longer you'll keep SoundCloud.com running in one of your browser tabs.

It's not just about integrations with existing social services: SoundCloud is slowly positioning itself as a social network in its own right. The site has long encouraged collaboration and interactivity through standard "likes" as well as time-based comments that can be posted at any point in an audio file's waveform.

Today, it takes things up a notch by adding a "repost" button that lets users share each other's sounds as they would on Twitter or Tumblr. That's great for discovery and user engagement and thus good for SoundCloud's longterm prospects. It's also potentially huge for sound creators, whose bedroom-produced remixes might - just maybe - get reshared by Snoop Dogg.

The Daily is no more. Rupert Murdoch's ambitious experiment in tablet journalism, launched not even two years ago, will stop publishing this month. Wasn't the iPad supposed to save publishing?

As failures go, this one is pretty spectacular. News Corporation worked closely with Steve Jobs himself to get the world's first iPad-only newspaper off the ground, having invested $130 million by the time it launched in February of last year. Flanked by Apple's Eddy Cue, Murdoch told launch event attendees that they were spending half a million dollars per week to operate The Daily. The world's second largest media conglomerate teamed up with the most valuable tech company on the planet to launch a product that attempted to reimagine news for the digital age. And it flopped.

Signs of The Daily's struggle became impossible to ignore in July, when News Corp announced that it would be laying off 50 of its 170 staffers and trimming the app's content. By that point, The Daily was said to have 100,000 paying subscribers, which apparently wasn't enough to sustain the operation even another five months.

Why The Daily Failed

Questions swirled about The Daily's viability from day one. Sure, you had the likes of Murdoch and Jobs behind the project, but a glitzy launch event with a stage full of powerful executives doesn't necessarily translate into a sustainable business model.

In his Newsonomics column for Neiman Lab, Ken Doctor estimated early on that The Daily would need to reach 200,000 subscribers to break even, which obviously didn't happen. Doctor was cautiously optimistic that this was possible, but noted that it would challenging given the publication's single-platform approach and limited Web presence.

That iPad-only focus is part of what drove The Daily into an early grave, according to former contributor Trevor Butterworth, whose Facebook commentary was republished by Romenesko.

"You can’t create an entirely new brand and take it behind a paywall after 4 weeks, while limiting its footprint on the Internet, and then expect people to buy it," Butterworth wrote. The content itself, he says, was just not good enough to attract paying subscribers.

Another economic hurdle is Apple itself. The company infamously takes a steep 30% cut from publishers' subscription sales, which makes it that much harder to turn a profit. This revenue share is the reason the Financial Times refuses to publish an iOS-specific app, instead opting for its own HTML5-based Web app.

Traditional publishers, many of whom looked to the iPad as their digital savior when it launched, have had mixed results. Wired's publisher loves the success he's seen with tablet apps, while MIT Technology Review editor Jason Pontin thinks the technology and revenue model is too cumbersome for media outlets, who would be better off publishing on the Web.

There are also inherent limits to the iPad format, as Felix Salmon at Reuters points out. Tablet-based magazines and newspapers might have more gee-whiz bells and whistles than print, but the Web can still be a faster, less clunky medium for publishing.

"No iPad publication is remotely as innovative or as fun to read as, say, BuzzFeed, because BuzzFeed has coders who can do very clever things with their chosen platform, and iPad publications don’t" writes Salmon.

New Experiments In Tablet Publishing

So The Daily's model didn't work out. Fortunately, others are willing to experiment with the format, even if it's on a much smaller scale.

Inspired by the Netflix model, magazine subscription service Next Issue launched on iOS in July. For $10 per month, readers can get access to dozens of magazines from the likes of Conde Nast, Time Inc. and Hearst. This approach comes with challenges of its own, but it's certainly worth a try.

Then there's The Magazine. Instapaper founder Marco Arment launched the stripped-down, iPad-only publication in October and it couldn't be more simple. For $2 per month, readers are promised eight thoughtful, well-written articles delivered in bi-weekly issues. The Magazine eschews the clunky, multimedia-loaded digital editions of print magazines in favor of a no-frills, high quality reading experience that Arment hopes people will think is good enough to pay for.

Guest author David Brauchl is chief communication officer for paid content strategy experts Piano Media. He was a professional news photographer for nearly 20 years, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize three times for his work in Sarajevo, South Africa and Germany.

Newspaper publishers struggle to successfully monetize their online content, and they are not getting any help from journalism schools, despite the fact that these are the very institutions preparing young people to enter the shrinking field and the ones you’d think would be trying to help newspapers stay alive, not hasten their demise.

Most people understand that the content found in newspapers costs money to produce. The cost of producing that content is not diminished when the content is distributed online.

Nobody should understand that better than academic professionals in the field of journalism.

Nevertheless, some in the field have become advocates for making content free, even to the point of encouraging students to circumvent newspaper pay-walls and, in some cases, showing them how it’s done.

“With the Arizona Republic/azcentral.com going to a pay wall, you may want to share the following info with your students (especially if they’re required to read the newspaper for your class),” Gilger wrote. “A PDF of the front page of the Republic is available at the Newseum Web site.”

Gilger’s email set off a remarkable discussion among faculty in which several members detailed techniques for defeating pay walls. One professor, John Leach, explained to his colleagues how he circumvented all pay walls by using two computers, different browsers, deleting cookies and using the “incognito” feature on Google’s Chrome browser. He justified his subterfuge with the assertion that “the students need that money more than Gannett stockholders do.”

Another professor, Paul Atkinson, claimed he had “found a bypass to websites like the NYTimes and LATimes that restrict access.” His detailed instructions were to “copy the headline from the website, paste it in a search tab. The results will show the title and source. Sure, it takes a few extra seconds, but I’ve never been denied access this way.”

A Lone Voice Of Dissent

Only one faculty member, former Wall Street Journal reporter Anthony Ramirez, questioned the majority’s view that paying for content was reprehensible, writing that “I’m troubled by this ballooning information-is-free ethos.”

University professors routinely include local newspapers in their curriculum to provide students with valuable examples of journalism in action. Clearly they must understand the impact a newspaper’s failure would have on the local community.

However, the presence of a discussion like this at a premier journalism school where the ethical position is the minority view shows how difficult the business of journalism has become.

What is the source of this ethical collapse? When did even the people who depend on the future viability of the industry for the sustenance of their careers and the well-being of their families decide that stealing the news was an acceptable action? Who gave them that idea in the first place?

Papers Brought This On Themselves

One answer could be that newspaper publishers themselves created their own undoing. Starting 1996, all the news that was fit to print was given away for free using a business model that was wholly advertising-supported. This approach worked for a while, with newspaper advertising revenue topping out in 2006 at $64 billion.

What followed, however, was stagnation and decline. By 2011, advertising revenue from both digital and traditional sources dropped to less than $25 billion. Clearly, radical measures were needed to preserve the industry.

Enter the New York Times. The Grey Lady developed a reasonable pay-wall system that provided the casual reader 10 free online articles from the newspaper per month. For more dedicated readers, the New York Times requested payment for an annual subscription.

It worked. The paper gained more than 350,000 readers when the pay wall went into effect, and the business continues to add subscribers at a 10% rate quarter-on-quarter.

A Wake-Up Call To Newspapers

While the New York Times’ pay wall does not completely discourage content theft, the paper’s bold approach served as a clarion call to the industry. With astonishing rapidity, other media publishers have jumped on the bandwagon. Currently, 25% of all U.S. newspapers monetize their content through some sort of payment system. Of course, there will always be readers who are comfortable with stealing proprietary content. No publisher can control the ethics of their readership. However, publishers can control the technology.

Until now, most content security was easily defeated by javascript, manipulation of cookies or browsers with incognito settings. Newspaper publishers, aware of the myriad flaws within their payment systems, have been ready for a solution.

Why This Matters To Me

How do I know about this, and why do I care? Genes maybe. My grandfather was the publisher of the Wheeling, W.Va., newspaper in the 1950s. My brother has been the editor of two major U.S. newspapers, and I made my living for almost 20 years as a photojournalist, covering most of the major conflicts in the 1990s, everything from the breakup of Yugoslavia to the Russian incursion in Chechnya.

I have worked for the wires, photo agencies, magazines, newspapers, even online, with Salon right when they launched. I know the value of news, how it impacts decisions made at the top, how it affects the people living in dire circumstances and how important a job being a journalist is.

I believe in media, and I want to see it survive, which is why, after taking some time to heal from PTSD, I got back in and joined Piano Media, a Slovak company, because it seems to me these guys, or companies like them, are the ones who will help journalism save itself.

The Piano Media Pay Wall System

In 2011 Piano Media developed a system that allowed publishers in Slovakia to bundle their prime content within a payment system and charge for it like cable TV. Subscribing readers paid one low price and received open access to everything within the system in return.

Readers have been receptive. Our system works. Within a very short amount of time, we expanded into Slovenia and then Poland.

We recognized that publishers in bigger markets were equally desperate to find ways to monetize content with technology that was both efficient and secure.

So we purchased the rights to software that could closely track audience engagement, enabling us to offer a proven payment system that could not be defeated by cookie deletion, use of multiple computers, special browser settings or alternative devices. This new system is called Piano Solo, and we will start rolling it out in December 2012.

I hope that our software will change discussions like the one that took place at ASU. No longer will teaching the wrong side of ethics and morality be easier than discussing both sides constructively.

I also hope that these discussions will help us restore the sense of trust we once had for our news when it arrived every morning.